Fritz Perls and
Gestalt Therapy

And Comparisons With Classical Gestalt Psychology

I. PRINCIPAL INFLUENCES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF GESTALT
THERAPY

As a teenager, Fritz Perls was heavily involved in theatre. Later, he was trained
as a psychoanalyst and studied with a number of respected analysts of his day.
Among the most prominent were Karen Horney, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, and
Helene Deutsch. During the First World War he was an assistant to the Gestalt
physiological psychologist Kurt Goldstein. His wife Laura, who was the co-developer
of Gestalt therapy, was also trained in psychoanalysis, and she studied under
Kohler and Koffka at the University of Frankfurt, as well as under existential
theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. Perls used to hang around the existential
coffeehouses and absorbed the secular existential currents of his day as he
had earlier hung aroudn theatres. After he repudiated psycholanalysis and moved
to New York, he built on his theatre background by studying Moreno's psychodrama,
he and Laura developed Gestalt Therapy, In paying attention to the messages
of posture and movement they drew from Laura's lifelong experience in modern
dance as well as Reich's bodywork, and her acquaintance with Feldenkreis and
Alexander techniques of body work. In New York, Gestalt therapy was primarily
awareness-focused and involved considerable individual work. (This variation
is sometimes called "East Coast" Gestalt.)

Fritz continued to develop the technique, moving west to Big Sur, introduced
the innovations of the "hot seat" and the "empty chair," and drew on his experience
in theatre and on psychodrama to bring an more active enactive dimension into
the work. Instead of merely talking to the therapist, the client is asked to
act out two or more sides of himself or herself that are in conflict, or to
act out dialogues with one or more other significant people in his or her life.
In so doing, the client temporarily identifies with disowned and projected parts
of the self and eventually assimilates them in an aware manner. Perls also lived
for some months in a Zen monastery in Japan, and it is rumored that at one point
he studied with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. Certainly there is a strong
resemblance between his "awareness continuum" and Gurdjieff's "self-remembering."

Despite all these influences, as we will see just below, the Gestalt outlook
provides the centering point, the compass, of Gestalt therapy. It brings all
these influences together in, fittingly enough, a meaningfully configured,
patterned, organized whole.

Doctrinaire Gestalt Psychologists who claim that Gestalt Therapy is not
"real Gestalt" are right and wrong. They are right because it draws together
many other influences with the old Gestalt psychology. They are wrong because
the Gestalt view of reality genuinely is the centering point that holds all
the rest of the influences together. Gestalt theory is extended into becoming
a dynamic process of personal growth and development, just as Goldstein extended
it into the physiological realm and Lewin extended it into the social realm.
We may note that were it not for Perls and Gestalt Therapy, instead of being
alive, well, and influential today, Gestalt theory would be a chapter in the
history books and that would be the end of it.

We can examine a partial list of comparisons between early Gestalt psychology
and Gestalt therapy:

EARLY GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

GESTALT THERAPY

Emphasis on pattern, whole, configuration

Person's whole being (speech, posture, action) etc.

manifests his or her way of encountering the world

Figure/ground

Successive emergence of one issue/dominant need

after another into foreground (personality gestalten) in a dynamic
manner

Transposition

Same behavior/thought/emotional pattern recurs

in different spatial & temporal contexts

Lewin's Zeigarnik effect / tension systems

Unfinished situations

The perceptual field

The organism / environment field

Perceptual closure

Finishing unfinished situations

Perceptual organization

Contact boundaries

The "aha" experience in learning

The "aha" experience in recognizing personal

defensive mechanisms & existential truths

The whole is different from the sum of its parts

Organized configurations of ways of being in the world

Goldstein's "self-actualization"

Organismic self-regulation

Goldstein's "a reflex is an act of the whole

organism"

Specific behaviors & mannerisms reveal larger conflicts &
issues

Awareness rather than introspection

Development of awareness rather than focus on

intellectual understanding

We select what we are interested in attending to

We select what we attend to and avoid

Meaning of anything changes according to context

Meaning of anything changes according to context

3. FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE GESTALT APPROACH

One aspect of Perls' particular genius was that he had an unerring nose
for crap, and an ability to take what was correct and valuable in each of
the perspectives from which he drew and let the rest fall by the wayside.
He didn't spent a lot of time refuting what he found useless, but simply
ignored it. Thus it was with psychoanalysis. He kept, developed, and expanded
upon Freud's penetrating insights and techniques and ignored the rest. My
own experience with the Gestalt process and outlook is that it serves as
a centering point that connects with every other psychological approach.
It dovetails neatly with Jung's powerful work on imagination, for example.
And at the opposite extreme, even though it is a discovery-and-exploration-oriented
approach rather than a programmatic approach like behavioral and cognitive-behavioral
psychologies, it dovetails with that approach as well because there are
clear elements of desensitization and the development and practice of new
behavioral patterns.

Perls' approach, like that of Rogers, is an active phenomenology which
assists a person in discovering his or her existential reality. It differs
in being an enactive, whole-body approach rather than a talking approach.

Like Rogers Person-Centered psychology, it developed primarily as a therapeutic
approach rather than primarily as a theory, and the theory grew out of practice.
It is radically different from, yet dovetails neatly with, Jung's approach
to dream work. It borrows a number of concepts directly from Karen Horney
and Wilhelm Reich. And it is centered in the psychological gestalt of a
person's present moment. Now here are a few more elements of the process
in just a little more detail than in the table above.

The facilitator is always paying attention to the PATTERN, WHOLE, CONFIGURATION
of the person's being in which an experience is embedded.

The most dominant need or unfinished situation becomes "FIGURE"
and emerges into the foreground out of the rest of the person's experience
which becomes the "GROUND," or background. When it declines
in importance through some kind of resolution (or even boredom),

something else becomes figure, and so on.

The goal of therapy, counseling, or personal growth is for the person
to become fully capable of "ORGANISMIC SELF-REGULATION," that
is, responding from his or her own center and needs, (with attention to
sensory, intuitive, emotional, and cognitive modes of experience) within
the context of the situation.

Developing DIRECT, IMMEDIATE AWARENESS of the total perceptual field and
of specific details in it is a central element of the work. The development
of immediate awareness, with particular emphasis on sensory awareness, is
more characteristic of Gestalt Therapy than of any other psychological approach.

The path to direct awareness involves both TECHNIQUES TO SHARPEN OUR AWARENESS
and tools for BECOMING AWARE OF OUR DEFENSES, repressions, and whirling
vortexes of thought that stand between us and a direct apprehension of what
IS in the here and now. In this, the Gestalt process draws on both phenomenology
and zen. And on Reich's seminal insight that when you hit a resistance,
rather than trying to barge through it, THE RESISTANCE ITSELF BECOMES THE
CENTER OF THE WORK. The person develops the ability to dismantle defenses
when she is ready.

UNFINISHED SITUATIONS from the past, and concerns about the future, are
worked with in terms of the person's present experience of them. A painful
old trauma may be reenacted and mentally relived in the present. Old unfinished
situations that we carry around stop us frombeing fully present know because
we're responding to them, to some degree, rather than entirely to our present
reality.

WHAT and HOW are the focus of attention rather than WHY as in psychoanalysis.
When one person asks "Why did you do that?" about another's behavior,
it is often a statement concealed as a question. It is often an attack that
provokes the other person to defensiveness rather than discovery. Of course
the facilitator will wonder why the person does some things, but will usually
follow leads that present themselves in the process of paying attention
to the what and how.

NO INTERPRETATION is a central rule in the works. Your awareness has far
more value to you if it is your own discovery than if I tell you what's
going on with you, especially since I may be wrong. (Personally, I find
that inevitably as I follow along with someone who is working, I have little
hypotheses about where certain patterns and dynamics come from, but I check
them out in a non-interpretive way and drop them immediately if they aren't
productive. Erving Polster calls this noticing and following the "neon
arrows" that the person provides that point to important matters.)

ANXIETY is conceived of as leaving the present, not being in the here
and now, "the gap between the now and the later. Will I get applause,
or will I get tomatoes?" Fritz also described holding the breath
as a central component in anxiety.

EATING AND DIGESTING are treated as metaphors for what we do with every
dimension of experience. Do I bite into something, chew it up thoroughly,
spit out what I don't like, and assimilate what I find nourishing and healthy,
or do I "swallow whole" what others have told me to whether I
like it or not? (The latter is the mechanism of introjection.)

DREAMWORK. In Fritz' view, every dream is an existential message about
some important aspect of our existence. Gestalt therapy works with a dream
by asking the dreamer to identify with each aspect of the dream, BE it,
describe oneself as this element of it and act it out, in order to connect
with and re-own disowned parts of our own experience and personal power.

FRUSTRATION is an element of the Gestalt process. Claudio Naranjo speaks
of "SUPPRESSIVE TECHNIQUES" that the facilitator uses to thwart
the client's inauthenticbeing and avoidances. The flip side of this is "EXPRESSIVE
TECHNIQUES" that are used to help the person contact and develop unused
or underused sensitivities and capacities. These techniques are not something
fixed, to be used in a particular way time after time, but rather constantly
changing and evolving "experiments" that the facilitator intuitively adapts
to a given client at a given moment in a given situation. Although I believe
that Gestalt Therapy offers a more powerful collection of technique than
any other psychological approach, it's important to note that both Fritz
and Laura were adamant in emphasizing that the facilitator's underlying
attitude is more important than any specific technique used.

Gestalt work draws on Karen Horney's identification of our "shoulds"
or inauthentic introjects as a central aspect of personal growth, so that
we can go on to discover our own ways of being in the world that are true
to ourselves to take their place.

The defensive manouvers / neurotic emphasis about which Perls wrote most
extensively were PROJECTION (especially projecting my disowned power onto
others); INTROJECTION (uncritically "swallowing whole" ways of
acting, thinking, and feeling that you tell me to; RETROFLECTION (doing
to myself what I want to do to you, but fear the consequences. For instance,
I want to strangle you so I choke myself. I want to give you a box of chocolates
but I'm afraid you'll spurn me so I eat them myself. CONFLUENCE is a fuzzy
lack of contact in which there is not a clear distinction between where
I leave off and you begin. This may involve projection--that is, I intrude
my conceptions of you into your space and don't leave you room to be yourself;
or it may involve Introjection--I don't establish my own boundary but allow
your definition of me to obtrude far into my space. (Erv & Miriam Polster
have dealt wonderfully with the subject of contact boundaries in Gestalt
Therapy Integrated.

Perls spoke of LAYERS OF NEUROSIS. On the surface is the "cliché
layer" (How are you? Fine.) Below that is the "roles and games
layer" in which we pretend to be what we want others to think we are.
Below that is the "phobic avoidance layer," or "anti-existence
layer," or "impasse layer" where a person retreats into nonawareness.
There the games are gone but I'm not in contact with who I truly am. Next
comes the "implosive layer," where there may be a feeling of very
tight, suppressed affect, where a feeling of tightness and tenseness pervades
the room. I call working at this layer "dental gestalt." Below
that is the "explosive layer," in which the person explodes into
anger or grief or orgasm or Zorba-like joy and aliveness. One relatively
seldom sees an explosion into orgasm in the Gestalt group, but explosions
into tears and anger are common. Often this is into the opposite of the
person's characteristic modality. Someone who always cries contacts and
expresses the underlying resentment and anger; or someone who always gets
angry contacts long-suppressed grief. Perls spoke of these layers as "peeling
the onion."

To get a real feeling for the Gestalt approach, watch a video of the process
in action or read Fritz' autobiography "in and out of the garbage pail."
The goal is not to "be happy," but to live fully. To be real.
To experience ourselves, others, and our world as we truly are and be in
a passionate connection with our inner selves and our lives. In their basic
outlook, Perls and Jung had a lot in common. Jung's conceptions were transmitted
to Perls through Otto Rank.